A Place to Sit Before and After Eating Ice Cream

a review of Now Everybody Really Hates Me by Jane Read Martin and Patricia Marx, illustrated by Roz Chast

Bedrooms are holy spaces and that’s why it’s actually good/healing to drink wine and eat crackers in bed. Are you in your room now? What are you wearing? Haha. JUST KIDDING. Throw on some gregorian chant music and read what I’m writing. Now Everybody Really Hates Me walked so A Room of One’s Own could run. Don’t fact check me on this. Our sulking narrator, Patty Jane, vows to stay in her room forever after insulting her little brother, Theodore, at his own bday party (feminist icon).

I think of the title of this book every time I wake up after a night of drinking and 1) complaining I’m not getting enough male attention 2) telling my secrets to people who never asked??? 3) treating my angels-from-above friends carelessly because I’m doing (1) and (2).

I loved this book so much that the pages are taped together and the spine is split. It’s illustrated by Roz Chast, of New Yorker cartoon fame, who is fantastic. I love the liberal media! It taught me about aspic, which think is savory Jello, two concepts that never the twain shall meet. Patty Jane is a card-carrying hungry legend, fiending after hot dogs, crinkly french fries, and ultimately wooed out of her bedroom by an ice cream sundae.

She vows never to speak English again, rather in code that only she understands. Let it sink in how truly psycho that is and how I am going to do that next time I am mad at someone. “Habool nix pardneereg meltinbaum corz?” asks Patty Jane “Jip lotsy fooch kibberslat binto…. SLÖDZ!!!” she replies. My dad used to read that part aloud to me and I would laugh like he was the Comedy Central 9/8 CST slot.

I have been thinking about two years ago, when I lived in a room that shut with plastic accordion doors stuck together by velcro. Every night, Sasha, my roommate’s cat would slam her hulking might through the doors and leap onto my bed like a furry long jump gold medalist. I’d bolt upright and initiate a feline relocation program much to her dismay, which she expressed via incessant mewing. The room was imperfect but did the trick: four walls, a bed, and a place to sit before and after eating ice cream.

This book is perfect because Patty Jane is a feminist icon who refuses to settle. She seeks to have it all and believes that with her own ingenuity, she will get there. Do you know who Patty Jane grew up to be? Billie Eilish. Her little brother Theodore? FINNEAS. Don’t fact check me on this. This book is not just for bratty, hungry 6-24-year-old women. It’s an anthropological study! It’s a philosophical text! It’s an exegesis of the nuclear family! An architectural digest! A meal plan! And a reminder that when it feels like everybody really hates you, just eat some ice cream.